Guild Wars 2

First thing I want to say is that revenant looks great. The skill effects are cool and unique, and that’s wonderful. Major props to the artists that came up with some of the new assets.

Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like ANet doesn’t even consider effect spam when designing skills. The revenant AoEs like the road and the axe fire field are massive, opaque layers that last for a long time and cover the entire area with heavily saturated colors. Ventari’s tablet passively spits out a ridiculous amount of flowers even when its literally just sitting there, and as a big glowing object obstructs projectiles and vision, and Mallyx form shades the whole revenant black and purple, covering their silhouette with random black spikes. That’s practically active camouflage, as if asurans weren’t bad enough in pvp/wvw.

Again, I don’t want it to come across like I’m bashing the effects. They look amazing. And I dunno, maybe HoT enemies will have better telegraphing or something. But we shouldn’t have to squint through a massive haze of bricks and red layers to actually see what the target is doing. Tone some things back. Does the tablet’s passive ticking heal really need an effect at all, much less a huge ground covering flower pulse? Does the axe fire field need to literally fill in the entire rectangle with such an opaque layer? I didn’t think it was possible, but it’s literally even worse than guardians right now. There’s got to be some things they can dial back.